Aaron Boodman created Greasemonkey back in the day. He also worked on Gears. And most recently he created Chrome Extensions. I have a funny feeling that folks were pinging him daily “hey, when ya gunna give me Greasemonkey on Chrome” and he just delivered:

One thing that got lost in the commotion of the extensions launch is a feature that is near and dear to my heart: Google Chrome 4 now natively supports Greasemonkey user scripts. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension I wrote in 2004 that allows developers to customize web pages using simple JavaScript and it was the inspiration for some important parts of our extension system.

Ever since the beginning of the Chromium project, friends and coworkers have been asking me to add support for user scripts in Google Chrome. I’m happy to report that as of the last Google Chrome release, you can install any user script with a single click. So, now you can use emoticons on blogger. Or, you can browse Google Image Search with a fancy lightbox. In fact, there’s over 40,000 scripts on userscripts.org alone.

Not all of the scripts will work. The deeper the integration, the less chance of success. We now have user scripts supported in a variety of browsers, and hopefully they get more and more portable.

If browsers could surface the functionality to mainstream users, good things could happen beyond us power users.

Even though the stable branch of Chrome supports extensions, Chrome extensions feel more like they should be in beta (or even alpha). But I think the Chrome model for extensions is pretty awesome, and should be great after it’s had another release or two to mature.